Breaking from their working-class origins, today's T-shirts are usually identified with leisure, even if they are worn under button-down Oxfords. But beyond that, a T-shirt can say anything about its wearer. There has probably never been an easier way of broadcasting your preferences and personality to those around you. In a mass-produced world, T-shirts allow for idiosyncrasy: You won't often find two people together wearing the exact same ones (unless, of course, the particular T-shirt is their uniform).
That said, idiosyncrasies become social movements when enough people join up. So it's not surprising that even with millions of T-shirts to choose from, certain people gravitate toward certain styles. When the Cold War was being waged, designer Katharine Hamnett's oversize T-shirts saying "Worldwide Nuclear Ban Now" were popular within the pacifist crowd; when South Park was hot, fans flocked to buy "Who Killed Kenny?" T-shirts. In this way, T-shirts become signs of the times--or at least signs of the current raging fads.
Times have changed since the days of Brando: Today you're apt to find not just young people wearing T-shirts, but middle-aged moms and church elders too. But if T-shirts are one of the most democratic kinds of clothing, it is also true that they can point to the most exclusive of associations. By its distinctive lettering or just the cut of its cloth, a T-shirt can advertise a person's membership in a group as unmistakably as any uniform does. What shirt is worn makes all the difference. "Nike" says one thing; "Boston Marathon 1995" says quite another. And the plain white T-shirt, worn tight à la Marlon Brando, does not necessarily broadcast "heterosexual hot-stuff" anymore. Suzanne Lussier, who works with twentieth-century fashion in London's Victoria & Albert Museum, points out that kind of T-shirt has played a role in the dress code of gay men.
Though they seem to be the most public of billboards, T-shirts can also be careful codes. Deciphering the message imprinted upon cotton cloth becomes the test of membership. Queer T-shirts, for example, will often use abbreviations or signs that heterosexuals aren't clued in to: "2QT2BSTR8" ("too cute to be straight") or the double arrow ("goes both ways"). The artist Barbara Kruger plays with this idea of coded clothing by printing her own T-shirts with the words "money" and "class" silk-screened in red on their fronts--frankly admitting what other articles of clothing try to say with discretion.
But if the T-shirt were a clue to anything, it would be your United
States passport. Americans are especially conspicuous in their T-shirts
when visiting other countries, and people abroad laugh at our unique fixation
on all things cotton and short-sleeved (especially when combined with
white socks and fanny packs). In last year's PBS series "Wonders
of the African World," the host, Harvard University's Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., stuck out like a sore thumb while wandering the markets of
Khartoum in a bright white T-shirt imprinted with a painting by the African
American artist Jacob Lawrence. His dress seemed to proclaim "tourist
on holiday" more loudly than "Harvard professor shooting documentary."
Wear your heart on your short-sleeve
2QT2BSTR8